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Just how stupid can you be? Obviously intended as a rhetorical question, clearly all of us agree there is no need for an answer. Right? Yet every single time I ask this specific question I feel as if I have set myself up and then I want to hit my own self in the head with a brick, or a hammer or any handy heavy item.

Truly, I feel as if every single blessed time I ask this specific question I have raised the bar on Stupid, as if it isn’t at all rhetorical but instead as if I am issuing a challenge. What is it that causes people to give me that blank fish eyed stare just before they respond with, “Did I fail the test? Give me another chance, I can do better I can be much stupider.”

I am flabbergasted by the level of stupid alive and well throughout society today. It amazes me every day what people will do and say thoughtlessly. People tend to live in bubbles of entitled ‘me’, heedless of their power to aggravate, annoy, hurt and even at times do great harm to others. Many of us, yes I will admit to my fair share, walk through life with blinders of how our words, actions and even lack of action affect those around us.

Just how stupid can you be?

It is sometimes truly impossible to judge how our actions affect others until after fire rains down on our heads. It might not be our intention to do harm, to hurt but by our inattention to the details we do so nonetheless. Other times, well we simply walk through life with our heads so far up in the clouds, our hearts so encased in the ice of our history we fail to consider the consequences of our words or actions. This is the ‘stupid’ of smart people. We have huge numbers of stupid smart people in the world today, people with intellectual intelligence who utterly fail the emotional ‘smart’ test, for a variety of reasons.

Then there are the truly stupid, those who simply wake up every day and say to themselves, ‘Val posed the question, issued the challenge and I am going to greet the world with my version of STUPID and then up the ante’. These are the people I truly don’t understand, the people I wonder about. These are the people I drive by on the side of the Texas freeways piled up into each other, the people who during the winter months slam on their brakes across the icy bridges of the Dallas freeways thinking, ‘I have four wheel drive’.

These are the dumb-asses who blow up my phone with, ‘I have a job for you’ but haven’t got a clue what I do, haven’t read my resume and want to pay me $25 an hour less than the market rate for my skills, why you ask? Well because according to them, ‘they can bring someone from (name the country) who would be willing to work for that rate. Yes, I really have had these conversations. Yes, they really do say that to me. Yes, it is insulting. It is especially insulting because this has been going on for years and our rates have already been cut by at least 50% in the past decade for just that reason.

Then there are those genius asshats who are simply STUPID because they can’t help themselves, they aren’t socially competent enough to exist in the same world as you or I, but they do. These are the people you scratch your head at. I said the other day I am selling my house. I am selling it for a reasonable market price, not expecting a windfall and recognizing there are things that will need to be done by the next owner, because I have lived here for more than a decade. On the other hand, I have also done many upgrades to this house so it is a trade-off. Guess what boys and girls, I am not paying for your desire to ‘upgrade’ or ‘redecorate’.

Don’t be stupid and please don’t insult me. Really I don’t care if you have small children, don’t care if you think you should have ‘better’ carpet than what my offered allowance will pay for, or if you think the fact that I smoke in my office is ‘bad’. The truth is, it is my house, I pay the mortgage here today. I recognize what is required and have offered a significant amount of cash at closing so you can do the necessary painting and carpet replacement, but don’t insult me with an offer of $25K less than the asking price and then give me a sob story and ask for more than double the allowance.

My answer? Go look at houses in your price range and STFU. Entitled are we? No I would say, ‘Just how stupid can you possibly be?’ Truly, I could go on and on. I could start in on our political landscape and I just might, but not today. I could trip lightly across our ‘reality’ television (oh that might be close to the same thing), but maybe another day. My problem though? Every single time I ask the question, I feel as if I am raising the bar and there are far too many people who want to take up the challenge. What the hell is wrong with people today? Why is it we aren’t celebrating brilliance, reveling in clever? Can anyone tell me why we are tripping wildly down the path of dismal and abject intellectual poverty, please help me understand.

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This has been a year of ups, downs, exploration, joy, pain, choices, decisions and change. I have seen my share of sad, okay let me say it outright, my share of down on my knees on the floor and begging for mercy depression. I have spent far too much of my time isolating myself, allowing my introvert free reign, while the rest of my life suffered the consequences. I have spent far too much time, trying to catch up with myself, in too many ways and spent too much of the past year afraid.

Afraid of losing all I have fought for.

Afraid of being alone.

Afraid of being hurt.

Afraid of …. Well afraid of far too many things to list.

The funny thing about being afraid, fear absolutely paralyzes you. Fear prevents you from making choices, whether good or bad, fear stops your ability to choose.

I have known for a very long time I needed to make some life altering choices. There were things in my world weighing me down. The first and likely the largest was my house. I don’t know why I have hung onto this monstrosity for so long after my marriage ended. I have spent thirteen years here, longer than anywhere else in my adult life. I do not love it, some days I hate it. It hasn’t been a home in years, if ever. It has been a menace to my health and well-being for at least five of the thirteen years I have been here. It is far too big for one person, by about 2,000 sq. ft., well maybe not quite that much but it is far too big for just me.

So I had to make decisions, for my health mental and otherwise:

Decision #1: My house went on the market 10 days ago.

Decision #2: I am not going to buy right away. Instead I am going to put what I decide to keep in storage and rent for 6 months while I find a new home that pleases me. This will be the first time in my adult life I buy a home with just me in mind, where only my desires, my likes, my wants are taken into account. I am going to take my time.

Decision #3: I am not only going to significantly downsize my home, I am going to downsize my ‘stuff’. This includes letting go of books, CD’s, clothes and other ‘stuff’ I have carried across town, across the state, across the nation and across continents. I will keep what I love, what is meaningful, what belongs in the life I intend to create.

Decision #4: I am paying off 80% of debt (assumes a close to full price offer on house) which will allow me to make different decisions about work and contracts. Only thing that will remain will be car and student loans (woe is me I will pay these till I die).

So here I sit, in my very clean house. It has been shown a few times since it went on the market. There have been four open houses too. Every morning I wake up and run around like a mad woman, making certain everything is in its place, nothing is hanging out of a drawer and all the animals are in their kennels before I leave the house. Every single day, I hope the odds are with me and someone will like all the upgrades I have made and they will say, ‘Yes, this is the one I want’.

In the meantime, the contract I have been working since last May is hanging by a thread. I am still working but not enough hours. I am looking for the next one and hoping hard it comes soon. I am hoping all the stars align and the house sells, the next contract is one that I have been talking to for a couple of weeks now and will give me a great opportunity to do something really different in a new / old city for 18 months at a great rate. If not this one, well there are a couple of others that might be great also, right here in town. I am hoping all the stars align and maybe one would lead to a full time job where I could maybe, just maybe end my career without any more contracts. Wouldn’t that be better than what I have been doing for far too many years?

So, as I make life altering choices my focus shifts. Some of it hurts. Some of it is simply scary. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and think to myself, ‘what the hell, what are you doing, are you stupid or simply crazy?’ I think all of that, then I simply shrug my shoulders and think, ‘Well, it won’t be the first time you have had to start over’.

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Ignorance is bliss they say. I might have agreed once upon a time, now though I believe otherwise and find we must stand against ignorance as something to be hated and fought with all we are and all we have. This is not a finger pointing campaign against only one side, no indeed not. This is looking across what the universe has offered us in the way of choice for our next President and thinking to myself, “What in the Hell have we gotten ourselves into?”

Truly we are lost, we have spent so many years self-destructing we are now at the end of the fuse we lit with the election of a B grade movie actor and now our nation is ready to explode. On one side we have the leading candidate under Federal Investigation and she may well be indicted, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. On the other side we have a Reality TV star who plays on the fears, hate and worst inclinations of the American people. I do not take these things lightly, I do not look at these candidates and smile, thinking to myself well it is a choice between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea as it so often is during election season. Indeed not this time, on one side the fix has been in since 2008 when she lost to the current President, this time we never had a chance at a valid and legitimate choice. On the other side there was a busload of choices at one time, those who might have been reasonable choices never got traction and the American public are left with a Fascist in the making, a Dominionst/Anarchist and two Right-Wing Theocracy nuts, though to give it to Kasich he hides his leanings very well.

Honestly? No matter who makes it to the White House in November, the next four years will be Hell for the American people and we have only ourselves to blame. We created this terrifying disaster in the making. We, yes that is all of us no matter which side of the aisle we fall on, every single last one of us, we are at fault. We failed to understand Washington is our house, all of it. Those we send to Washington, they are servants of the people there to do the bidding of the people. We failed to demand they serve us, sitting back and whining when they behaved badly or failed in their jobs but sending them all back time and again. We pointed and laughed at their childish antics, but sent them back. We made up Memes to post on social media, but sent them back. They disrespect every last one of us, but we send them back time after time.

Our infrastructure is failing. Our schools are failing. Our young people are leaving university saddled with debt they cannot pay. Our economy is stagnate and incomes have failed to rise in decades. Jobs continue to flee the country, embedded in ‘Free Trade’ deals that lift every boat but ours. Immigration programs committed to driving down wages and putting Americans out of work continue to expand (H1B, H2B, L1), along with outsourcing, off-shoring and near-shoring. States are poisoning the waters and with it their people, stealing pensions and cutting off access to health providers and no one cares. There is not one real candidate talking about how they will solve these issues, not one. Yes, they are talking about them when asked but when pushed they don’t have solutions, go on read their own words.

We did this! We did it through apathy. We did it through our own willingness to sit it out and hope others would pick up the slack. We did it when we continue to simply color in the circle with the (D) or the (R) next to a name instead of demanding more and better. We did it when we continue to send back to Washington the same useless, thoroughly corrupt snakes term after term rather

than demanding term limits in Congress, rather than standing up and firing every last one of them from the jobs they have failed to perform for decades. We did this, on the left when we allowed that Twat Waffle Debbie Wasserman Schultz to completely corrupt the nomination process and we did not demand her resignation as head of the party. We are at fault. We own all of it. We deserve the government we have. We deserve the breakdown of this nation, we built this and the cracked foundation is ours to repair at a horrifying cost.

Sept. 6, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Now the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea are lapping at our heels and laughing. Fear, violence, anarchy and the potential for Fascism is just around the corner. Depending on the November outcome, every single small step forward this nation has taken toward equality, civility and a society based on the one person one vote, secularism and the rule of law will be wiped out for one hundred years. The sad fact is, there is a growing segment of this nation praying this will be the outcome.

Is this the nation you want? I can tell you, I am deathly afraid this cycle. I am not just afraid of the Republicans, I am afraid of the Democrats too. I am afraid we have become so corrupted we cannot see beyond the demagoguery, ideology and soundbites to do what is right for this nation. For once, stand up and find a solution push past our prejudices, fears and ignorance to find the right solution. Demand from our public servants and those who would sit in the Oval Office more than they are giving us today.

No, Ronald Reagan was not the best President in our lifetimes. Stop it.

No, Jimmy Carter was not the worst President in our lifetimes. Stop it.

No, George Bush (either of them) were not to blame for every single bad thing ever in the past eight years. Stop it.

No, President Obama is not the Devil and is not to blame for every single bad thing in the past eight years either. Stop it.

Do we have problems? Yes, yes we have massive problems. As a nation, as a people we need to start demanding Congress and especially those who wish to be sent to Congress in this election cycle understand those problems and have real ideas about how to fix them. We need to demand of the candidates who want to lead the nation, they have real ideas about working with Congress to address the problems of this nation, the real problems of this nation.